The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Short Cuts
Lowest review score: 0 Gummo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. This Ain't California
    Smartly incorporating Sasa Zivkovic’s sweet and simple animation, as well as an exhilarating, punk-infused soundtrack, Mr. Persiel extends the film’s appeal beyond hard-core skaters.
  2. Tokyo Waka: A City Poem
    The film is a short, nimble consideration of the collision between the wildness of nature and the orderly bustle of modern urban life. It is also an essay on ornithology, Japanese culture and the challenges of pest control.
  3. The Death of Louis XIV
    [Mr. Léaud's] riveting, and a little alarming. As for Mr. Serra, while he often enjoys playing the foppish provocateur in his interviews, his film is sober, meticulous and entirely convincing in its depiction of period and mortality.
  4. The Light of the Moon
    As a resource for those looking to understand the process of recovery, it’s hard to imagine a more comprehensive or sympathetic look at the challenge of surviving.
  5. Half the Picture
    The stories that Ms. Adrion elicits may be infuriatingly recognizable to women who work in many fields. But if there is a missing element in her analysis, it is the effect that sexism has on these women’s artistry, not only their livelihoods.
  6. The Breaker Upperers
    This collaboration between Jackie van Beek and Madeleine Sami — who wrote, directed and star together — exhibits their fairly irresistible comic chemistry, even if the conceit of the movie wears a bit thin.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hell Is for Heroes
    An unusually well-made film.
  8. Denise Ho: Becoming the Song
    The film does an excellent job of introducing the pop star to unfamiliar audiences, contextualizing her activism and, more broadly, examining the role art can play in shaping our beliefs.
  9. Father of the Bride
    The film, while it packs all the satire of our modern tribal matrimonial rite that was richly contained in the original, also possesses all the warmth and poignancy and understanding that makes the Streeter treatise much beloved.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Time Limit
    What Time Limit has to say is sobering, important and exciting and, though its principals are caught in circumstances that are extraordinary, it meticulously arrives at terrible truths that are timeless and universal.
  11. Rebel Ridge
    Sticking within the bounds of reality does make for a heck of a good slow-speed car chase. Those craving flashier, bullet-spraying butt-kickery will have to hope for a more gonzo sequel.
  12. The Cranes Are Flying
    Thanks to Mr. Kalatozov's direction and the excellent performance Tatyana Samoilova gives as the girl, one absorbs a tremendous feeling of sympathy from this film—a feeling that has no awareness of geographical or political bounds.
  13. Cartel Land
    Mr. Heineman has said that he wanted Cartel Land to feel like a narrative film as much as possible, and to an extent it does. What’s missing is a directorial point of view, including about vigilante groups, the so-called war on drugs, and Mexican and American policies and politics.
  14. Heat
    Its sensational looks pale beside storytelling weaknesses that expose the more soulless aspects of this cat-and-mouse crime tale.
  15. Soul Power
    Soul Power, as aptly and succinctly titled a movie as I have ever seen, takes you to a place where the discipline that produces great popular art is indistinguishable from the ecstasy that art creates.
  16. We Grown Now
    Some of this is effective, even if too many of Baig’s filmmaking choices — the honeyed cinematography, the score’s agitated violins and Malik’s preternaturally knowing voice-over — finally overwhelm the story’s fragile lyrical realism.
  17. An Honest Liar
    Directors Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom have produced a jaunty, jovial portrait with a surprising sting in its tail.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shotgun Stories
    The film is a here-and-now American potboiler and a stripped-down parable that can be appreciated by any culture.
  19. The Meaning of Hitler
    The Meaning of Hitler takes a multifaceted, often counterintuitive approach to examining the underpinnings of fascism.
  20. The Price of Everything
    While this colorful and inquisitive cinematic essay on the state of the art world is occasionally skeptical and consistently thoughtful, cynicism isn’t really on its agenda.
  21. What's Love Got to Do with It
    The brilliant, mercurial portrayal of Ike Turner by Laurence Fishburne, formerly known as Larry, is what elevates What's Love Got to Do With It beyond the realm of run-of-the-mill biography.
  22. Calibre
    The character dynamics are recognizable in the way they hew to genre conventions. But the details provided in the writing, and by the two leads’ performances, add distinctive details and dimension here. This makes the film’s harrowing action all the more believable.
  23. Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer
    How was this careless, self-destructive human rhythm machine able to outlast almost all her peers? Maybe the vitality of the jazz she made kept her alive. She was one tough lady.
  24. Soul Kitchen
    Its insistent zaniness makes Soul Kitchen very different in spirit from Mr. Akin's two previous films, "Head-On" and "The Edge of Heaven," which established him as a major European filmmaker. Seriously silly, it evokes the same high-spirited, pan-European multiculturalism in which people of all ages and backgrounds blithely traverse national borders as they aggressively pursue their destinies.
  25. Hail Satan?
    Wry and illuminating.
  26. After the Thin Man
    In a changing age it is completely heartening to discover that the Charles family-Nick, the amateur sleuth, Nora, his understanding but frequently underfoot wife, and Asta, the hydrant fancier—has weathered successfully the well-known vicissitudes of time.
  27. Amrum
    To Akin’s credit, the film isn’t tastelessly sentimental (see “Jojo Rabbit”), and it depicts Nanning’s awakening with the kind of subtlety and restraint that suggests his moral education will continue evolving after the end of the movie.
  28. The Whistlers
    It is Porumboiu’s most elaborate feature and in some ways his least ambitious. Like a meringue or like a whistle, its substance is mostly air.
  29. The Dog
    The Dog is, as its title suggests, a documentary portrait, but it’s also an exploration of that sometimes messy thing called identity.
  30. The Pez Outlaw
    Like Pez, the film is charming and colorful — and perhaps too sweet.
  31. Julie Keeps Quiet
    It’s a film that maintains that Julie’s story is available only when she’s ready to tell it.
  32. Zola
    There is plenty of drama, and some hard feelings . . . but not a lot of intrigue or honest emotion. I guess if that’s what you’re after, it’s best to stick to Twitter.
  33. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks
    For all its faults, “We Steal Secrets” reminds us that despite the potential of WikiLeaks, its project of truth and consequences remains treacherous and complicated in practice.
  34. Talk to Me
    By choosing simplicity over specifics, the filmmakers free themselves from the weight of words and open up space for a mood of intense disquiet and unusual sensitivity.
  35. Cinévardaphoto
    The unutterably charming Cinévardaphoto brings together three short works by the filmmaker Agnès Varda, one shot in digital video, the others on celluloid.
  36. Ghostbox Cowboy
    Ghostbox Cowboy feels like a William Gibson adaptation directed by David Lynch and Jean-Luc Godard — while not directly lifting from or nodding to those artists. It’s rare that a release so late in the year is so noteworthy, but this is a genuine find.
  37. Midnight Special
    The charm and audacity of this film lie in the way it blends the commonplace and the bizarre.
  38. Occupied City
    Time is stretched differently in Occupied City and passes far more quickly than you might imagine, despite the running time. Some of this has to do with the fluidity of McQueen’s filmmaking and how the disparate parts build power cumulatively. Much of this, though, has to do with how McQueen approaches the past.
  39. The Unforeseen
    There’s nothing wrong with Mr. Redford and his love of nature. But there’s something irritatingly softheaded about the generic, nostalgia-tinged blandishments that the film finally resorts to -- a Wendell Berry poem, a grizzled old farmer wielding a sickle -- in place of truly hard questions and solutions that may effect meaningful change. With the polar ice caps melting, I want more than poetry and blame. I want a plan.
  40. Spa Night
    The film is a contemplation of the loneliness, tension and anxiety of outsiders pursuing a piece of the American dream.
  41. Undertow
    A small movie with a full heart, Undertow takes an old idea - the loving, lingering ghost - and gives it reverberant, resuscitated life.
  42. Zhantai
    An intellectually engaging movie. But Mr. Jia's careful objectivity and regard for material detail are not matched by narrative rigor.
  43. Japan
    Luckily Mr. Reygadas has talent to match his ambitions; or, rather, gifts that undercut them sufficiently to give his film a prickly, haunting poignancy.
  44. Inni
    The best concert films achieve a marriage of sound and image that feels effortlessly harmonious, and in that regard Inni, a musical portrait of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, leaves most of its genre in the dust.
  45. Tickled
    [Mr. Farrier] and Mr. Reeve see the humor, but they also see the pathos — because it’s all fun and giggles until someone gets hurt.
  46. Rojo
    Adopting a cool, oblique yet accessible approach that complements the washed-out, nicotine-stained palette, Naishtat builds a modular narrative that increasingly bristles.
  47. Brothers
    Filmed in the unadorned Dogme style and acted with a ferocious intensity.
  48. The Last Station
    The kind of movie that gives literature a bad name. Not because it undermines the dignity of a great writer and his work, but because it is so self-consciously eager to flaunt its own gravity and good taste.
  49. Mucho Mucho Amor
    The movie is generous about allowing Mercado to present his view of the world in his own words, but it’s a shame not to be able to see the world through his eyes.
  50. The Guest
    Mr. Stevens’s watchful restraint gives the early scenes a slow burn and a sinister glaze.
  51. Margin Call
    The accomplishment of this movie is that it allows you to sympathize with them, to acknowledge the reality of their predicament, without letting them off the hook or forgetting the damage they did.
  52. Red Penguins
    If Red Penguins doesn’t always strike a satisfying balance between the glib and the grim, the broader topic — the commercialization of hockey — affords it a novel lens on Russia’s economic transition.
  53. The Hand of God
    I wouldn’t say that this movie is a distraction from reality, any more than I would call it a work of realism. It’s a beautiful tautology: a true-to-life movie about a life made for movies.
  54. Listen Up Philip
    Words do more than hurt, they also slash and burn in this sharp, dyspeptic, sometimes gaspingly funny exploration of art and life, men and women, being and nonbeing, and the power and limits of language.
  55. The Ritchie Boys
    Those whose tolerance of Greatest Generation war stories isn't exhausted, not to mention those who still thrive on them, will find the group of men who called themselves the Ritchie Boys good company.
  56. Regular Lovers
    While the film’s desperately sad finale indicates that Philippe Garrel knows the truth of '68 better than most and might have suffered a crisis in faith in the years since, this magnificent film is itself proof that all was not lost.
  57. Vic + Flo Saw a Bear
    This isn’t, it turns out, the usual once upon a time, but a story about the unknowns that can swallow us up.
  58. Los Reyes
    The kids’ ambling chatter, the dogs’ routine of rest and play, lull us into a contemplative state, which allows us to better appreciate the mystery of existence.
  59. Too Many Crooks
    Too Many Crooks is strictly of that surface order, but it's a good, crazy, brisk farce comedy.
  60. The Vourdalak
    Surrender to its vintage vibe and its emotional kick may surprise you.
  61. The Wild Goose Lake
    The movie exhilarates.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Holy Mountain
    Mr. Jodorowsky’s movie is a dazzling, rambling, often incoherent satire on consumerism, militarism and the exploitation of third world cultures by the West. It unfurls like a hallucinogenic daydream.
  63. Son of Monarchs
    The film’s rich imagery will be imprinted in your memory, returning to you in dreams.
  64. The Wonders
    Ms. Rohrwacher’s strengths here are the tender intimacy of the performances, particularly those of the older child actors, and her gentle meandering, both narrative and cinematographic.
  65. World on a Wire (1973)
    World on a Wire, while too slow and diffuse to count as a lost masterpiece, is valuable in expanding our sense of what Fassbinder could do and is also a source of much visual and intellectual pleasure in its own right.
  66. Wonder Woman
    Its earnest insouciance recalls the “Superman” movies of the ’70s and ’80s more than the mock-Wagnerian spectacles of our own day, and like those predigital Man of Steel adventures, it gestures knowingly but reverently back to the jaunty, truth-and-justice spirit of an even older Hollywood tradition.
  67. Murina
    For the most part, the director cuts loose her characters and lets them and the story’s vague ideas — about gender, sexuality, money and power — swirl and drift, leaving you to decide how and whether they all fit together, or don’t.
  68. Something in the Dirt
    Overlong and overwritten, “Dirt” nevertheless unfolds with an enjoyably comic quirkiness, a tale of two doofuses who sought meaning in symbols and found comfort in friendship.
  69. My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument
    Both Paul and the film would seem maddening if they weren't so passionately sincere, and if Paul did not gaze at the film's many beautiful young actresses with such an amazed, seductive gleam in his eye.
  70. Tito and the Birds
    The adventure plot in the Brazilian feature Tito and the Birds, directed by Gustavo Steinberg, Gabriel Bitar, and André Catoto, is no great shakes — it wouldn’t be out of place on a Saturday-morning cartoon — but visually, the movie leaves room for the viewer to synthesize, and to dream.
  71. Temblores
    Bustamante renders the film’s distinct milieus with extraordinary texture. The sanitized and soulless spaces of Pablo and his family form an evocative contrast with the lively, bustling bars and streets frequented by Francisco. But this emphasis on sensory detail comes at the cost of the big picture.
  72. Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)
    Squaring the Circle is slick and enjoyable enough, but it is also, like the company it chronicles, something of a boutique item, and the reminiscences grow faintly monotonous after a while.
  73. The Hidden Blade
    Though less powerful than Mr. Yamada's "Twilight Samurai" (2002), The Hidden Blade is an affecting portrait of the impact of profound change on people with limited options.
  74. The Iron Ministry
    The Iron Ministry is neither boring nor confining, which is just to say that it’s not a long trip through a faraway country. It’s a work of art — vivid and mysterious and full of life.
  75. Witness for the Prosecution
    For a courtroom melodrama pegged to a single plot device--a device that, of course, everybody promises not to reveal--the Arthur Hornblow Jr. film production of the Agatha Christie play "Witness for the Prosecution" comes off extraordinarily well. This results mainly from Billy Wilder's splendid staging of some splintering courtroom scenes and a first-rate theatrical performance by Charles Laughton in the defense-attorney role.
  76. Chronicles of a Wandering Saint
    The superior second half, in which Rita’s reality is upended, eases into a realm of fantasy that is admirable — and more effective — because of its uncanny, inventive minimalism.
  77. Boys Go to Jupiter
    Here is a movie notably unafraid to manifest the weirdest of the weird, no matter what the Mr. Moolahs of the world have to say.
  78. (500) Days of Summer
    Slight, charming and refreshingly candid little picture.
  79. The Man Who Knew Too Much
    Even in mammoth VistaVision, the old Hitchcock thriller-stuff has punch.
  80. Me and You and Everyone We Know
    Though her movie has a clear narrative line, and might even be classified as romantic comedy, it is also a meticulously constructed visual artifact, diffidently introducing the playful, rebus-like qualities of installation art to the conventions of narrative cinema.
  81. Spencer
    Stewart leverages her own star power to turn Diana into someone familiar. The intimacy and care the character craves is something the audience feels compelled to supply.
  82. The Image Book
    I found it haunting, thrilling and confounding in equal measure. It is a work of ecstatic despair, an argument for the futility of human effort that almost refutes itself through the application of a grumpy and tenacious artistic will.
  83. The Secret Lives of Dentists
    Intensely appealing.
  84. The Revenant
    Mr. Iñárritu isn’t content to merely seduce you with ecstatic beauty and annihilating terror; he wants to blow your mind, to amp up your art-house experience with blockbusterlike awesomeness.
  85. La grande strada azzurra
    A political movie that, partly through the powerful lead performance of its star, the relatively young Yves Montand, transcends its own politics.
  86. Natasha
    Mr. Bezmozgis creates a disturbing portrait of a girl turned calculating and nihilistic by her upbringing, and there is no coyness here.
  87. The Kingmaker
    It’s an ugly story shrewdly told, with a sense of humor and also a deeper feeling for history.
  88. Incredible But True
    Coming in at a tight and talky 74 minutes, Incredible but True is a sweetly absurd time-travel comedy that coats its lunacy in a touching poignancy.
  89. Cassandro
    Williams, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, is an expert orchestrator of naturalism. The trouble is that lucha libre, built on glitz, is anything but naturalistic. The self-assured freedom Saúl channels in bed never makes its way into scenes in the ring, which tend to tire when they should dazzle.
  90. Night Across the Street
    Unlike his precursors Georges Franju and Luis Buñuel, who reveled in the shock of incongruity, Mr. Ruiz took it in stride. His gliding, floating camera could make wild impossibilities look utterly natural. And so it is in Night Across the Street, where the present commingles with the past, and seeming is another way of being.
  91. House Party
    Unlike most teen-age movies, which attempt to impose some kind of adult order and significance on the events they recall, House Party has the light touch, rude wit and immediacy of rap as improvised by someone in top form.
  92. La Piscine
    Pretty people behaving poorly in beautiful settings is something we don’t see as much of in cinema as we used to. This is a master class in the subgenre, and one of unusual depth.
  93. The Music Man
    It's here, and the rich, ripe roundness of it, the lush amalgam of the many elements of successful American show business that Mr. Willson brought together on the stage, has been preserved and appropriately made rounder and richer through the magnitude of film.
  94. No Sudden Move
    The schematic for No Sudden Move remains perfectly intact, and the thing itself works pretty much according to the specifications. A consumer-rating agency would give it high marks for safety and efficiency, but it never leaves the showroom.
  95. Safe
    Brilliantly as it begins, Safe eventually succumbs to its own modern malady, as the film maker insists on a chilly ambiguity that breeds more detachment than interest.
  96. Stutz
    A film that skillfully navigates vulnerability, brainy insights and artistry.
  97. Sisu: Road to Revenge
    It’s gloriously, audaciously silly, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a good time.
  98. Stronger
    Stronger takes more artistic risks than any other American-made “inspired by true events” picture I can recall.
  99. Smoke Signals
    Shows colorful style and a wisdom beyond precocity about its setting and its people.
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